Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy.

Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy

by Mary D. Garrard,

University of California Press, 2010

Mary Garrard's contributions to art history are considerable. This fact reveals something of the success and practice of feminism in academia, a feminism that Garrard has championed in her research and teaching. Her work on the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1) established lucidly and persuasively that there have, indeed, been great women artists. What struck a nerve, however, was Garrard's claim that connoisseurship and biography are two sides of the same coin, that the coin is counterfeit if the two halves are severed, and that these two established art historical methods can be applied to serve a feminist and humanist agenda. Connecting these two pillars of traditional art history to feminism forever changed a generation of young scholars who found new ways to study the lives and production of women, and to approach female subjects within visual narratives as something other than victim, beloved, or sexual object. Garrard's attention has been focused equally on modern and contemporary art in numerous projects shared with Norma Broude that deepened the depth and breadth of feminist inquiry in the discipline. (2) Brunelleschi's Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy is, in some respects, a summa of Garrard's explorations of art and its history, a book she began thinking about nearly twenty years ago (ix).

One might suggest that this work is a conventional survey of Renaissance masters, for they are all here: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, and a few early Mannerists. The works selected for analysis should be familiar to any undergraduate student in art history--Brunelleschi's magnificent dome adorning the cathedral of Florence, Masaccio's Expulsion from Paradise, Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus, Leonardo's Adoration of the Magi, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Giorgione's La Tempesta, Titian's Danae with a Nurse, to name a few. Brunelleschi's Egg shares with time-honored surveys of this period the Renaissance artist's delight in the investigation of nature and his absolute certainty that nature could be known and her secrets revealed in his work. It is with Garrard's interpretation of how Renaissance artists understood and worked with these secrets of nature that she parts ways with traditional accounts of Italian Renaissance art.

At the heart of Garrard's study is the shift in early modern Europe from understanding nature as an organic--and feminine--force in charge of the universe to the scientific study of nature's elements and man's control over these. Renaissance artists played a significant role in the investigation of nature and the application of discoveries, including developing single-point perspective, inventing new technologies for engineering and construction, and the study of human anatomy through dissection. This story is usually told as one of progress, with the protagonist, man, struggling to master nature's secrets and tame her chaotic ways. For Garrard, Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (3) was an especially valuable model for showing that

   ... the critical transition that
   occurred in the Renaissance, from
   an organic to a scientific worldview,
   was accompanied and
   assisted by the gender metaphor
   that equated nature with the
   female. Merchant situated this idea
   in the histories of both philosophy
   and science, and explained its
   dynamic operation. She described
   the replacement of an ancient
   cosmology that viewed the earth as
   a living organism, personified in
   thought as a nurturing mother, by
   the mechanistic view of the female
   earth as passive matter, to be acted
   upon and controlled by man (2).

Brunneleschi's Egg extends Merchant's field of study by locating the origin of this development within the visual arts and identifying male artists as the leaders.

Garrard establishes the following themes and examines them throughout her text: "the demonstrable power of Nature to create new life and her competition with God in this respect; the positive definitions of Nature as creative artifex and maternal guide; and her negative definition as evil and corruptive feminine matter, inferior to masculine form" (29). Of paramount importance is the issue "whether art can compete with Nature in the creation of beautiful or perfect things" (29). Clearly, the stage is set for a paragone, the concept so important to the Renaissance, this time a competition between nature and the artist as the force of creative energy.

Garrard's text is divided into nine chapters in four parts, these parts being "Great Mother Nature," "Nature and Art in the Quattrocento: From Pupil to Equal," "A Balance of Power: Pictorial Metaphors for Nature in Transition," and "Art and Nature in the Cinquecento: From Competitor to Master," together with an Introduction, Epilogue, and lengthy bibliography. I cannot hope to do justice here to the entirety of this 429-page book, and will focus here on the initial chapters where the author presents her argument and addresses the riddle of the title. The large-format volume is well-illustrated throughout, including 241 black-and-white and sixteen color illustrations. In her Introduction, Garrard reminds the reader of the numerous female embodiments humankind has projected onto nature's forces, including Artemis, Aphrodite, and Demeter. She notes the arrival of patriarchy "and the ascendancy of a father god" either before or with Greco-Roman culture, and finally Natura's subordination to the patriarchal God with the advent of Christianity (1).

The single chapter in part one, "The Gendering of Nature as Female: From Prehistory through the Middle Ages," presents an overview of humanity's understanding and interpretation of nature before the Renaissance. This examination begins with Mother deities from Catul Huyuk (6000 BCE) to appearances of the medieval goddess Natura in illuminated manuscripts of such works as the Roman de la Rose, and concludes with Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Effects of Good Government in the City and Country (1337-40, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena). Most interesting here is Garrard's discussion of naturalism in painting of the trecento and quattrocento. Regarded by art historians as "a form of cultural progress," naturalism, as Garrard reconsiders, is "another means of disempowering Natura" (29). The details of nature--hills, plants, animals--that we see in Lorenzetti's Good Government fresco, for example, take the place of Natura, both as a symbol and as a power. This fresco also contrasts nature and culture in its juxtaposition of urban and rural environments. Garrard points out that the contemporary viewer saw this landscape beyond Siena's walls as the city's possession, as nature conquered and in the service of the city.

Throughout Brunelleschi's Egg, Garrard examines accepted interpretations of Italian Renaissance art, insisting that we question many underlying assumptions we have long held as truths. In chapter two, "Technology and the Mastery of Physical Nature: Brunelleschi and Alberti," this mother of feminist art history considers the work of art history's fathers, including Millard Meiss, Richard Krautheimer, Rudolf Wittkower, and of course Giorgio Vasari. For example, in his assessment of art after the Black Death, Meiss focused on quality and style and suggested that the decline in quality was due, in part, to the ravages of the plague experienced throughout society. Garrard cites recent examinations of the art of this period that have focused less on connoisseurial matters and more on archival documents, revealing that artistic commissions did not decline, but that patrons supported painters, sculptors, and architects in commissions that commemorated their families and supported their community. Garrard's approach to art production after the Black Death is from yet another angle. She urges scholars to consider the psychological dimension of cultural production in Florence in the century following the plague "to better understand the function of art in a sophisticated society that has been traumatized" (34). In her analysis, she concludes that the artistic response to the plague, specifically the turn to classicism, was an attempt to control and order nature because the plague was evidence of nature out of control. The turn to renovatio by artists such as Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Alberti "would shift the balance of power between culture and nature in the physical world" (34). Indeed, the "restoration and replication [of ancient monuments] would tilt the balance on behalf of culture, which would then be able at least to hold its own against destructive nature ..." (34).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The chief center of "culture's defense against nature's unraveling" was, according to Garrard, Florence, with its extraordinary building campaign (34). Construction actually began in the thirteenth century (before the Black Death hit in 1348), with an ambitious plan for urban development and growth focusing on the city's new civic structures--the cathedral, the Palazzo della Signoria (town hall), and Orsanmichele (guild hall). Construction gathered momentum even as the plague struck and the city fought an expensive war against Milan. At least one contemporary, the humanist Coluccio Salutati, despaired of the city's infrastructure and the poor state of its buildings, including the cathedral (34). Florentines would soon find in Filippo Brunelleschi an artist, engineer, and inventor who would restore and complete the city's most astonishing structure, the cathedral.

It is Brunelleschi's dome for this cathedral (Fig. 1) that Garrard cites as the primary example of an artist's conquering of nature, describing it as "the largest creative project of the fifteenth century" (34). For Leon Battista Alberti, who dedicated the Italian translation of his treatise on painting to Brunelleschi, artists of his day surpassed antiquity in their discovery and use of new technology. And it was for Brunelleschi's technological superiority over nature--through his appropriation of meaning identified with woman, the Virgin in particular-- that Garrard describes the dome as "the key site of the contest between art and nature, for its history embraces the critical issue of the relative creative powers of nature and the individual artist" (34).

A dome for the cathedral was planned from at least the 1360s, evidence being the evocation of a domed cathedral in Andrea da Firenze's fresco of The Church Militant (ca. 1365-68) in Florence's church of Santa Maria Novella. The problem, of course, was how to span the 140 feet of the octagonal drum at the crossing; conventional wooden scaffolding could not be used to span this distance. Florence had to wait for Brunelleschi's bold technical expertise to accomplish this feat. Garrard reviews the various interpretations of Brunelleschi's technical achievement: from Vasari's story in his "Life of Brunelleschi" about the artist breaking an egg just enough to allow it to stand upright, to accounts of Brunelleschi's understanding of Archimedes, parabolas, ellipses, and the quinto acuto. One conclusion she draws reads like art history heresy: "Indeed, the terms of [Brunelleschi's] glorification seem excessive for his actual achievement. Though practical considerations were significant, they were surely not insurmountable" (49). For Garrard, it is less significant that Brunelleschi knew how to construct this dome than that the construction signifies this architect/engineer's subduing of nature, once gendered female, with a form that evoked a woman's breast.

Why did the Florentines want a dome? Garrard points to several important references: Plato made an analogy between an architectural dome and the human head, thus dignifying domed structures; the Pantheon in Rome was certainly an inspiration for Brunelleschi and his contemporaries; and there were many established associations of the dome with the cosmos and the vault of heaven. But Garrard draws our attention to what has been left out of the literature of Renaissance architecture, and that is "the discourse of Marian civic nurture" (40). The body of the Virgin Mary was considered the tabernacle of Christ, and her identification with Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church) expanded the faithful's understanding of her body as an altar for Christ to include her body as protector of the congregation. Garrard adds, "It cannot have been lost on Quattrocento Florentines that the shape of the Cathedral's dome visually resembled an emblem of the mother's nourishing power, the female breast" (37). Garrard makes the connection between the dome and the Virgin's breast primarily through Orcagna's domed tabernacle of the Virgin (135-259) and the domed tabernacle over the sculpture group of the Virgin and Child (before 1399), both at Orsanmichele in Florence, where bread was distributed to the poor and the actions of the nourishing Virgin were perhaps nowhere more clear.

   Conceived and planned in the
   midst of economic and social crisis,
   the projected dome would offer a
   stable sign of nature's power,
   solidified in theologically
   appropriate form, and would
   provide psychological comfort,
   through an image that signified,
   for every Florentine, the nurturing
   and protective Mother Church (39).

And as Garrard points out, Brunelleschi's creation of this dome, representative of the nurturing and protective powers of the Virgin Mary, was achieved through technology, through his conquering of nature's forces.

Brunelleschi's Egg is one of several excellent recent studies of the history of science in early modern Europe. For example, Rome et la science moderne: Entre Renaissance et Lumieres (2008), a volume of essays edited by Antonella Romano for a project organized by the Ecole francaise de Rome, focuses on the significant role played by papal Rome to control developments in early modern science. And Stephen Gaukroger, in The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685, notes that the "West's sense of what its superiority consisted in shifted seamlessly, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, from its religion to its science." (4) Neither volume examines the extraordinary history of nature embodied as female, the role played by artists as competitors of Natura, or the shifting relationship between nature and art; Garrard has been at work on this for some time. A foreshadowing of Brunelleschi's Egg can, however, be found in a 1987 article she co-authored with Norma Broude.

   Within cultural history, it has been
   the arts and humanities that have
   sustained our species' memory,
   affirming its association with the
   earth and with nature, and
   celebrating its rituals, traditions,
   contradictions, and beliefs. By
   contrast, the more masculinist
   disciplines of the applied sciences
   have had as their purpose not
   only the understanding of man's
   relation to the earth, but also the
   controlling, and, perhaps
   ultimately and inadvertently, the
   destruction of it. (5)

Garrard is to be thanked for contributing to the history of science and reminding those who applaud STEM initiatives (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) that visual artists working within a humanities-centered worldview are at the heart of modern science. I have to wonder if, following Garrard's argument, our current focus on STEM isn't the most recent claim of these "masculinist disciplines" over Natura?

Marjorie Och is Professor of Art History at the University of Mary Washington. She has published on Vittoria Colonna, Properzia de' Rossi, and Giorgio Vasari, and currently is working on Vasari's accounts of cities in his Lives of the Artists.

Notes

(1.) Mary Garrard, Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989); and Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001).

(2.) Mary Garrard and Norma Broude, The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact (Harry N. Abrams, 1994); Feminism and Art History: Questioning the Litany (New York: Harper and Row, 1982); The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (New York: HarperCollins, 1992); and Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Postmodernism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005).

(3.) Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980).

(4.) Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 12.

(5.) Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, "Feminist Art History and the Academy: Where Are We Now?" Women's Studies Quarterly 15/1 and 2 (Spring/Summer 1987): 15.

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Author:	Och, Marjorie
Publication:	Woman's Art Journal
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Mar 22, 2012
Words:	2591
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